Making A Mother's Day Card

There are many print on demand sites (POD) where you can have your own greeting cards printed, and there's nothing like sending a special card to a special someone. Many POD sites allow you to order one or two cards at a time, rather than having to order large quantities.
Some of the places to get your cards uploaded and printed are Zazzle (okay cards), Redbubble (the best quality I've found, though the cards are an odd size), ImageKind (okay cards, not my first choice), CafePress (haven't ordered their cards), Moo.com, and Greeting Card Universe (usually my first choice for good quality affordable cards). There may be others, but these are the ones I've either tried or researched.

Today, I'm going to run you through making and uploading a card on Greeting Card Universe. You'll need to sign up for a free account when you are ready to upload your first card.

GCU's standard card size is 2100 pixels by 1500 pixels. They do have a template you can download, but you don't really need one. Just keep a couple of things in mind - the print may cut off a little bit at the edges, so if you use borders and text, be sure to keep them 1/4" from the edge of the card design or make your borders wide enough that if any is cut off, it isn't going to affect the overall design.

Open the image you want to use for your card, and do any processing to the actual image. I've decided to use a picture of the Forsythia in my back yard while it was in bloom. Since it flowers in early spring (sometimes while there is still snow) it's a good choice for a Mother's Day card.

Once my processing is done, I'll need to resize and crop my image to fit the 2100 X 1500 pixel size for GCU. This card is a vertical design, so the width is 1500 pixels and the height is 2100 pixels. I've decided I'll add a border of yellow, just a little lighter than the yellow of the flowers.

There are any number of ways you can do this - if you don't want to use a drop shadow, you can simply increase the canvas size by the number of pixels you want for the border. Select image, then canvas size. Choose your colour, increase the current pixel size shown in the canvas size area by 100 pixels on both the width and height and it will give you 50 pixels top and bottom (a total of 100) and 50 pixels on the left and right side, creating a frame around the outside of the image. Now you have to resize your image to 2100 X 1500 because after adding this type of border your image is going to be 2200 X 1600.

I tend to use a new layer, fill it with the colour I want using the bucket tool, and then select the colour. With the colour selection active, I use the "select" option from the menu, then choose modify, and then contract. I contract the selection by the number of pixels I want left (in other words, the outside edge,) so I'd contract it by 50 pixels. Then I choose the "cut" or delete option (right click, delete). This cuts away the center section of the colour, leaving you with an even border all the way around.

Now that I have my border edges, I'll need to decide if I want to leave them plain, add a drop shadow, or any other designs using some special photoshop brush. Now that my basic design is completed, I need to add the text. For this card, I'll simply put "Happy Mother's Day to My Wife". Now that I have my finished design, all that's left to do is upload it to Greeting card Universe.

For those applying for new accounts, your first card upload is always accepted. After that, cards wait in a queue to be reviewed before being put into your gallery. If you aren't intending to sell the cards online, you can opt to have them placed in your private gallery, where you can order them yourself. There is no review for private gallery cards.

Go here and sign up for a free account at GCU. You'll have options that you can use to setup a card shop if you want to sell them online. For now, we're just going to upload this new card. You can play with your shop settings later on if you want to create a sales gallery.

On your administrative page you'll see a list something like this one:

Go down the list and select "Create a Card". You'll be taken to a page like this where you can upload your image to create your first card. Click the browse button and select your newly created card front from your computer and click the "upload images" button. Your uploaded card design will appear below the upload box, in Section 3. To create the finished card, click the card or the select option.

On this page you'll add a card title, keywords to help your card be found in a search, select a category, choose options for matte or glossy finish, and put in any notes you want listed with the card. You will also be required to click the box to agree that you own the rights to the image, or that you have obtained the rights to use it for your card. Once you've selected everything, click the next button at the bottom, which will take you to the page where you can add your inside text. Click the link that says "click here to edit inside text, and you'll get a text box to add your text, select the colour of the text, and choose a font.

When you've finished adding a verse, choosing colours and font, click save and you'll see a preview of how it will look inside the card. Click next and you'll see your card in the manage cards section. The first one should appear in your "shop front" pretty quickly. Others you upload afterward will show as pending until the card is reviewed.


This is my completed card which I've just uploaded to my GCU account. Once they've reviewed my card and deemed it as appropriate (in the right category, etc.) it will appear in my shop front, ready for others to purchase.

Make A Simple Silhouette in Photoshop

Silhouettes can be used for many different projects and are easy to create in photoshop from a photo. To start, open your photo and crop it to the area that contains the object or person you want in your silhouette.

Now use the quick mask and paint the area you want to make into a silhouette. Use a hard brush of an appropriate size for your image, and take extra care around the edges and details to make sure you've got neat edges. Use your eraser and brush and work carefully until the area is covered.

Release the quick mask, invert the selection (click the mask button, choose select from the menu, choose inverse) and copy the selection to a new layer (choose edit from the menu, choose copy, then choose edit again, and select paste). Turn off the visibility of your background layer so your selected area shows up on a transparent background.


Now you simply make it black. Select "image" from the menu, then select "levels" and pull all of the sliders to the right. If you have bits and pieces of colors such as red, white, yellow and blue still showing, desaturate (image, adjustments, desaturate) and run it through the levels function again. If you still have areas that aren't black and should be, touch them up with your brush.

At this stage I would take a small soft eraser, zoom in on the silhouette and smooth out any rough areas. Now, delete your background layer and save your silhouette as a .png file. If you'd rather save it as a .jpg, fill the transparent area with a colour of your choice using the bucket tool, then select "layer" and flatten and save it as a .jpg instead.

My finished silhouette has been turned into a Mother's Day card with the addition of a marbled background, some flowers and a bow, and some text on the front (the inside reads "you're the best Mom ever! We love you Mom) - using a silhouette instead of the photo makes the card less specific and personal. This card can be given by any young brother and sister to their mom on Mother's Day.


In a few days, when this card is released it will be available to purchase and send directly from the Greeting Card Universe website. You'll find it in my shop here: Fine Art Cards

Painting A Photo

This is rather a long tutorial that will show you the basic way to take a photo into a digital "painting" if you are not an artist. It's a slow process, but you can follow as many or as few of the steps along the way as you are comfortable with. You can also add things to the painting technique once you've become familiar with the method - you can add your own steps or special processes along the way to make the results uniquely yours.

What I'm going to show you here are the basic steps to beginning your painting. In finalizing your photo-illustration or digital painting, you will provide the finishing steps yourself. You'll see my painting at the end of the process, but some of my own final steps will not be included.

The reason for this isn't "secretive" so much as it is "personal". I don't want my own work to look exactly like someone else's, and nobody else is going to want their work to look exactly like mine.

Those of you who are artists with painting and drawing skills aren't likely to need or want this tutorial since you already possess the skills to make a painting without a photo, but beginners who only want to make a special image for a family member or friends will find this helpful. The only tools you'll really need are photoshop, or a graphics program with similar functionality.

Ready to start?

Select your image an open it into photoshop. Here's mine. A photo of one of my daughter's - I'm planning to make a Mother's Day card with this one. The first thing you'll want to do is crop it to the area you want to retain, and think about any changes you might want to make along the way - such as hair or eye colour, the addition of makeup or clothing changes, or a different background. In creating a painting over the photo, you can change things as you go.

Most likely I will make a background change - probably something simple, like a painted backdrop that photographer's use. The first step I need to take to change the background is to do a rough isolation of the image portion I want to paint over.

To do this I'll use the quick mask. The quick mask will allow you to paint over the parts of the image you want to copy. Click this icon in the toolbar (usually located near the bottom of the tool bar), select a brush size and paint over the parts you want to move to a new layer. When I'm doing a rough isolation, I usually like to work with a large brush (300 pixels or larger for large areas, 100 pixels for smaller areas) and I find the "hard" brush (in your brush options, select the hardness slider and move it to the right to take your brush from soft to hard) gives better results. Once you've covered the area to be copied your image should look something like this one, with a red "mask" - notice the way this shows in your layer palette - instead of the normal "blue" active layer, you see a gray masked layer.

If you turn the quick mask off (click on the quick mask button in the toolbar) you'll see the selection outline (moving dotted line) that outlines your entire image and everything EXCEPT the area you've painted. That's because the area you painted is "masked off" - sort of like if you've covered an area on your wall with painters tape. What we actually want is to access the area we masked off - we want that area to be our selection. To do that, simply choose the "select" option from your menu, then select the "inverse" option. Now you'll see the area you masked off is the selected area. Now you can choose "edit", then "copy", then select "edit" and "paste" to paste it to a new layer.

Now I'm going to select my background - I tend to do this before I begin painting, but you can wait until the painting portion is finished if that's what you prefer. I've chosen one of my standard backgrounds - pretty tones that I find complementary to women's skin. Copy your new background to a layer in between your original photo and your isolated portion. You'll probably find there are areas along the edges of your isolated layer that you don't want - you can clean these up by erasing the extra bits if you like, but since you are going to recreate this layer in painting, you don't really need to do that. If you decide to use this layer as PART OF your painting, then you may want to.

At this stage, if you haven't been labelling your layers, make sure you label each layer appropriately so you know which layers are which. Label each new layer as you create it.

Now you begin the painting portion. You have two options. If you are skilled enough, you can paint every section by hand (using a mouse, or if you have a tablet, then your pen and tablet). If you aren't, then you can create each section of the painting by using the quck mask technique given above. Because this tutorial is for beginners, we'll use the quick mask method. Click on the quick mask button and paint over your first section. My first section will be the skin. This area will need to be a little more precise than your first masked section. Once the masking is complete, click the mask button again to get the selection area, choose "select", then "inverse", then choose "edit" then "copy", then "edit", then "paste". Your masked skin layer is now copied to it's own layer.

Duplicate this layer. Working on the duplicate skin layer, select the magic wand. Set it's tolerance to 100 or higher, and make sure the contiguous option is NOT selected. Select the skin on this duplicate layer with the magic wand. Now select the colour picker from the tool bar and click on an area in your skin to select an "all over" skin color. Select the paint bucket tool from the tool bar and make sure it is set to foreground, normal mode, opacity 100, tolerance about 50. Now click inside the selection area. This will fill your selection with the "paint" colour you have chosen. Because normal human skin is usually not the exact same color you may have to click a couple of times to fully fill the areas you want filled. Some areas, like lips and eyes don't need to be filled with skin colour. What you should have is something that looks like this. The colour is flat, without detail.

If you are skilled enough, you can add details with your brush, if you are not an artist or not ready to try this step, then you can blend this skin colour paint with your "real" skin layer below by using the blending modes and opacity to get something you like. We're going to try and add details ourselves. On a separate layer, you can add your eyelashes and eyebrows. Paint them in with a fine brush and vary the colour of hairs slightly. On another separate layer paint shadows and details using slightly darker shades and tones of the skin colour you've chosen.Once you have the details roughly brushed in, use the gaussian blur filter to blend them into your painted skin.

Now I'm ready to begin
the hair. I'll tell you right now - I am not good with hair. I usually work with multiple colours over a number of layers. My first layer is a light reddish brown, and I've chosen some watercolour brushes to work with. My hair is usually a rough colouring, then blended and reduced in opacity to reveal the original hair, which I usually keep in the underlayers to give some detail of individual hair, and to give it some definition. This project had three separate layers of colour for the hair, which were blended together (layer, merge down) as one.

Once this is completed roughly, then it's time to adjust the layer opacities as well as the layer blending modes. I can't really tell you what to select in this stage - it's entirely up to your own eye - your likes and dislikes. Once you have all the layers blended you can flatten and save your painting.

This can be the final stage if you are happy with your results. I usually take mine into Corel Paint and continue the work in there - particularly on the hair and blending. I find Corel Paint has better tools for blending paint and better brushes for paint strokes. If you don't have corel paint, you can use the filters in photoshop. This is the final image from photoshop, without having had the benefit of any additional painting and blending in Corel Paint.


And this is my completed image after having worked on it in Corel Paint - adding more detail, blending and brush strokes.